The Importance of being Mobile-Friendly!

It is no secret that mobile usage is on the rise – over 50% of the website’s traffic comes from mobile devices, while 30% of online purchases are from mobile phones – and Google are taking notice.

Since mid-2015, Google has been focusing on the mobile friendliness of a website and has put together an algorithm to rank webpages by this. It makes sense for Google to do this as it helps mobile users find websites that are mobile friendly, giving them a better result.

So, how do you make sure your website is being indexed by Google’s mobile algorithm?

Well, first things first, you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly, meaning it needs to be responsive when users are on your website using mobile devices (changes size depending on the device being used) or you need a separate mobile website (m.website.co.uk).

You can easily test to see if your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, then you will definitely need to fix this!

Responsive websites are probably the easiest way to go. Here at Big Eye Deers, when developing new websites we make sure our client’s websites are responsive and do cross-device testing to check it works seamlessly.

If you have a brand new website that needs developing then it is important to consider mobile design. Google even says you should think about mobile-design first, and not desktop as more people will see your site from a mobile nowadays.

However, if you already have a website and it is not mobile-friendly then you can talk with your developers to see what your options are, they can make amends to your current website to make sure it is responsive, or you can even have a separate mobile-website.

If you are designing for mobile you need to consider the size of the screen on mobile devices. While a lot of mobile phones have big screens nowadays, not everyone does! Keep this in mind when designing – make sure content is short and sharp, make CTAs bold and clickable, and make things easy to find.

And, what next?

Well, once your website is all designed and developed, and mobile-friendly, you will need to make sure it is running quickly and is optimised. A slow website is not a good website and people are likely going to click away if they have to wait too long.

Google has a great tool called Test My Site which lets you see what the mobile speed and friendliness is, and breaks down what needs to be fixed to help improve the scores. You can talk to your developer to go through the list or if you are tech savvy yourself, you can make the changes.

And that is that when it comes to a mobile-friendly website. It is important to consider all of these points when developing a website as you don’t want to fall behind and miss out on business opportunities because your website doesn’t look good on mobile.

We have worked on many websites and have built them to be responsive, and have designed a separate mobile website as well so if you are looking for a mobile-friendly website or want to make your website more responsive, give us a call and we can discuss what options are available.